By Zeno · October 8, 2026 · 3 min read
What a subscription costs: the median is $10 a month
The catalogue lists a usual monthly price for 475 of its 509 services. The median is $10. Half of everything you could subscribe to costs that or less, which is exactly why the total surprises people.
A subscription is priced to be forgettable. Ten dollars is a sandwich; it does not feel like a decision. The arithmetic that matters is the one nobody does at sign-up: ten dollars a month is a hundred and twenty a year, and the typical person has more than one.
Here is the shape of the catalogue's prices, counted when this page was built.
The distribution
Of the 475 priced services, 73 cost under $5 a month and 220 cost under $10. Only 10 cost $50 or more. The cheapest is $0.99; the most expensive is $150. The mean, $13.90, sits above the median because of that long tail at the top: a few professional tools pull the average up.
The practical reading: the expensive subscriptions are few, visible, and usually deliberate. The cheap ones are many, invisible, and the ones that renew for years after you stopped using them.
Why the small ones cost the most
A $54.99 plan gets reviewed because it hurts every month. A $2.99 plan never does. Over five years the $2.99 plan has cost $179.40, and six of them is more than a thousand dollars for things nobody in the household can name.
Price rises hide in the same place. A service that moves from $9.99 to $11.99 has raised its price by a fifth, and the email announcing it reads like every other email the service sends. Most people learn the new price from a statement months later, if at all. Zeno flags a price rise when a receipt shows a new amount for a service it already tracks, which is the only reliable moment to notice it.
There is a second reason the cheap ones add up: they are the ones that get started casually. A trial for a note-taking app, a month of a game's season pass, a cloud plan upgraded once to send a single large file. Each was reasonable on the day. None was ever decided against, because nothing ever asked.
The yearly view
Multiply the median by twelve and the typical subscription costs $120 a year. Multiply the mean and it is about $167. A household with ten subscriptions at the median, which is not unusual once streaming, music, storage, a newspaper and a couple of apps are counted, is paying $1,200 a year for things that each felt like ten dollars.
That is the number worth writing down, and it is why the app's ledger shows the yearly figure beside the monthly one on every row. A plan that is cheap per month and expensive per year is a plan to look at twice, and the yearly column is where that second look starts.
What to do with this
Two things, both quick.
- Write every subscription down with its yearly price, not its monthly one. A 20-minute audit covers it, and the yearly column is the moment the list starts to matter.
- Sort the list by yearly price and read it from the bottom. The cheap end is where the forgotten ones live.
A note on the figures
The catalogue's prices are the usual list price in US dollars for the common plan, gathered when each service was added and updated when a guide is. They are a reference, not a quote; your plan, your country and your date may differ. Every number in this post is computed from the catalogue when the page is built.